Regulations
By Jean-Luc Maracon
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What the Pilot Found. Before this expansion, the FCA ran an Early and High Growth Oversight pilot between July 2025 and…
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How the Unit Fits Into the FCA's Broader Support Stack. The Scale-up Unit doesn't exist in isolation. It slots into a wider set of FCA programs designed…
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The UK's Financial Conduct Authority just added five more companies to its Scale-up Unit — ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle, and Zilch.
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The five span a pretty wide slice of financial services. Modulr sits in payments. ClearScore handles credit information. Zilch operates in consumer finance.
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Worth noting: ClearScore, Modulr, and Zilch all sit on the Unicorn Council for UK FinTech, a coalition set up by Innovate Finance that brings together UK-based fintech unicorn…
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The insights from that pilot came out August 10, 2026. The headline finding isn't shocking, but it's important: early investment in governance and risk management matters. A lot.
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Those insights are now being fed directly into how the Scale-up Unit operates. So the firms joining now — ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle, Zilch — are getting support…
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The Scale-up Unit doesn't exist in isolation. It slots into a wider set of FCA programs designed to move firms along a structured path from early-stage to full scale.
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Related: FCA Spends £2 Million to Push 11 Million Car Finance Complaint Views
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The Scale-up Unit sits at the top of that stack, basically. It's for firms that have already cleared the early hurdles and are now moving fast enough that standard regulatory…
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Back in February, the FCA announced the first cohort of the Scale-up Unit: six firms that are co-regulated by both the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
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No date yet on when applications open for the next cohort. The FCA said it plans to open that process soon. No details beyond that.
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The Early and High Growth Oversight function will keep running alongside the Scale-up Unit. Its job is proactive engagement — finding firms that are growing quickly, including…
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See also: Revolut Lands Second EU Banking License With 600 Hires and EUR 1 Billion Pledge
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For the UK fintech sector broadly, the FCA's push here is partly about competitiveness. The argument is that if high-growth firms can navigate regulation more efficiently —…
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